The Korea Institute is pleased to announce the first Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellow in 20th Century Korea for academic year 2013-14: Dr. John (Song Pae) Cho.
Dr. Cho received his Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December of 2011. His dissertation is entitled, “The Luxury of Love: Queer Internet, Intimacy, and Insecurity in Post-IMF South Korea.” His research/teaching interests are in gender, sexuality, class and technology in South Korea and East Asia. Dr. Cho’s second research project is a comparative study of queer movements in Taiwan and South Korea.
Following a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2011-12), Dr. Cho is currently serving as a Social Science Council Research (non-resident) Postdoctoral Fellow in Transregional Research (2012-13). At UC-Berkeley, he is working on his first book manuscript, “The Luxury of Love: Queer Internet, Intimacy, and Insecurity in Post-IMF South Korea.”
As inaugural Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, Dr. Cho plans to analyze and write up his research findings, develop teaching materials, and further develop his scholarship on a queer critique of postcolonial nation-state formation and family-centered hetero-normativity in South Korea and East Asia. He will begin his postdoctoral fellowship at the Korea Institute in August 2013 and will be offering a class in the Anthropology Department in the Fall 2013 semester.
The Korea Institute acknowledges the generous and thoughtful support of Dr. Dong-Won Kim, whose vision for the Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellowship is to provide the opportunity to advance new scholarly horizons in Korean Studies, by promoting the study of 20th Century Korea with research and innovative teaching on original topics.